Digital Marketing
It's rare to find a marketing budget these days that doesn't include digital. As a branding agency, we use digital as one of our primary brand building tools. But as our Digital Director, Eric, likes to say, "The one thing you can count on in digital is change." So, defining Digital Marketing as a whole and figuring out which tactics make sense for your business can be increasingly tricky. The boring definition of Digital Marketing is: "The integrated marketing services used to attract, engage and convert customers online. Digital marketing utilizes multiple channels such as content marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, social media and online advertising to help brands connect with customers and uncover performance of marketing programs in real-time.” Yawn. In all actuality, it's a really fun and experimental channel. The good...and bad part of digital marketing is that it can be pinpointed to a very specific audience. The good is that this is your low hanging fruit. You can likely influence them directly if your brand is strong and your message speaks directly to them. The bad is that you're only talking to a very specific audience and the saturation of your brand for the future, if you put all of your eggs in the digital marketing basket, that isn't there. Which is why we only use digital as one of the brand building tools for our clients. Every new digital marketing client at TIV goes through our DISCOVER phase. This is our process to help define the most effective digital tactics and define how they'll work with the other brand building tools we use. SEO might be a great approach for some organizations but not for others. Same goes for social media...but without the research into both tactics it's nothing more than a swing in the dark. Whether the end result is a PPC campaign or an SEO initiative on your existing website, the key is to focus on building the brand. Branded SEO content is becoming steadily more attainable and with changes in Google's algorithm, the days of keyword-rich but not-for-human-consumption are gone. The age of compelling content and fully integrated Digital Marketing campaigns is here, so let's do this.